Thursday, July 31, 2008

Nice insight. and thought let me write some of my random views and not necessarily related to what Sandeep says here..guess being almost the weekend and waiting for a vendor to come to the office gives me a lot of free time :-)

Talking from a publishers point of view where when we go out to the marketers / advertisers / brand custodians / ad agencies the challenge for us is to make the above people understand all this. We have been talking this within our industry for quite some time now, and have been patting ourselves on our backs on the insights. I think its high time we go out to these brands and tell them the actual beauty of the online world which includes social marketing, mails, communications, content on demand when you want it where you want it.

Till date brands have been shouting and shouting and like sandeep says..do they really anytime stop shouting and start listening??!!. being and observer and partcipator in a social media networking platform is very good...but what is of social media we see is to be really looked at...do we see it as a platform where views are exchanged or is it just an impersonal mail platform.

The discussions here are a kind of social networking platform which revolves around content...question is how many brands do you think would like to target us guys here :-). Is this the right content for a brand like a shampoo??

Saw an example of seeding questions into a yahoo answers..something that was done on askjeeves about long time back..a very good innovation in the Indian internet scenario. but question is is the brand just observing there or even learning from their mistakes or listening to the people there. Is the brand talking back to the users of that forum or ARE They just looking at the ROIs..how many people registered...I guess the brands and us need to decide first how to use what to use...whether they want quantity or quality..and then what would they want to do about it.

There is no specific point which I am trying to make here. Except that we as an gency publsher brand and consumer are looking at quality and would spend time and money to get the same. whether it would be from a social networking platform - online or offline or from any other medium.

and yes the 30 sec spot, the 100 or 60 cc ad, or that 20 sec or 60 sec on radio, or the billboard that whizzes past you at 15 kmph or 60 kmph(depends on the traffic you know), or that word of mouth from a friend or wife, or that pesterpower from your kid...I guess all these are a part and parcel of social media which reinforces everything..and yes they are more expensive :-)